David Stephen Robertson was born in Scotland in 1874 . He graduated MA from the University of Glasgow in 1895 and began a career in the army. By the time of the First World War he was a Major in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He died on 1919 at Tientsin, China, a Lieutenant Colonel in the same regiment. The connection with the Renfrewshire poets came from his family who owned David Robertson, the Glasgow publisher of William Motherwell's works.
Robert Tannahill was born in 1774 in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland. Educated in Paisley, he was brought up as a silk weaver but is remembered as a song writer and poet. He drowned himself at Paisley in 1810 .
William Motherwell was born in 1795 . As well as being a poet, he was also Sheriff-clerk depute of Renfrewshire between 1819 and 1829 and became editor of the Paisley Advertiser in 1828. In 1930 he became editor of the Glasgow Courier and in 1932 issued his own works in Poems, Narrative and Lyrical. He died in 1835 .
Source: Dictionary of National Biography: Index and Epitome (London, 1903)
From the guide to the A collection of holograph poems and letters of two Renfrewshire poets: Robert Tannahill (1774-1810) and William Motherwell (1797-1835), from the collection of David Stephen Robertson, 1805-1887, (Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department)
